


Steal My Breath

by Luna



Category: Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead - Stoppard
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-23
Updated: 2013-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-05 17:32:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 509
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1096617
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Luna/pseuds/Luna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A prelude to a rude awakening.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Steal My Breath

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MixolydianGrey](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MixolydianGrey/gifts).



He wakes before sunrise, his heart pounding. Something has touched his face in the dark. A cat, he guesses, walking over his pillow. Of all small nocturnal creatures, he would prefer anything else to a cat. Don't they--

"Steal my breath," he says, putting a hand to his throat--

_Rope._

"--Light!" he calls out, hopefully, but there isn't any. Or any heat, come to that. Surely there was a fire here last night, or at least a candle to light him to bed. It wasn't all blackness and coldness and cats, he doesn't think. He fumbles around with increasing urgency, patting himself down for a candle stub or a bit of flint, feeling his way across the straw mattress.

There is a body. Sharp-boned, cool, motionless in his bed. He thinks, I am going to scream, I am screaming now, and the body stirs and sits up and claps a hand over his mouth.

"Not," the body--the man--says, "yet."

He shivers. Cold and fright and recognition, not necessarily in that order. "Oh," he says into the man's fingers. "It's you."

"Who else could it be?"

That's a fair question. Another fair question would be why--but he's just grateful that he isn't alone with a corpse. Or, worse, not alone with one. "There's a cat," he says. 

"Pardon?"

He reaches up and pulls the man's hand off his mouth. "There was a cat."

"I wish you'd choose between past and present tense," the man says. He is also shivering. They lie back down in their thin clothes, boots on, knee to knee, face to unseeable face.

Oh, he thinks, I have known you for so very long--and he says, "I can't. You choose for me."

"I can't," the man says, irritable. A slow exhalation against his cheek. Breaths traded like coins of gold. 

He huddles closer. Fingers on ribs. "All right then," he says. "It could be both. There is, and at the same time there was but is no longer, a cat. At least until the sun comes up. That ought to narrow it down--"

"It is not morning," the man says, and yawns to emphasize the point. Their foreheads touch. "I don't see anything, therefore it's nothing. It's neither."

"Both," he insists. It seems important to stand his ground, even though he is sinking inexorably back into the abyss of sleep. 

"Neither dead nor alive." The man's voice is fading. "Neither fish nor fowl. Neither...nor..."

He wakes up again to a great noise outside, hooves like thunder or thunder like hooves. There is a rider, shouting two words over and over.

They sound like cities or currencies or chess stratagems, but they are names, the names of men. He's certain of that. But he couldn't say which name he answers to, or whether it's both, or neither.

Now one of them will get up and grope his way to the window, open the shutters, admit the light. A hand holds onto a wrist. Just for one more second, he thinks, let's be nobody.

**Author's Note:**

> Treat for treat's sake. Happy yuletide!


End file.
